


knowing this

by kwritten



Category: Original Work
Genre: Female Protagonist, Gen, I love my girls, Trans Female Character, generous overuse of familial bonds, ignore this pls, is this the future? maybe? or another world's past? more likely, loosly based on austin walker's description of pattern magic, our world but adjacent, pattern magic, probably part of the world of Rabbits, this is an experiment okay?
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-04-04
Updated: 2019-05-06
Packaged: 2020-01-04 20:33:05
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 4,123
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18351191
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kwritten/pseuds/kwritten
Summary: The lonely one, tossed by sea and storm,The peaceful one, a step away,The dragon, a mountain now,The answer, in steps and paces and yet...The girl four, of six and no more.Forget this stolen piece of lore,A story told and told and told(Wrong)The girl four, can't know what is in store.For this is how the world endsatone two three four five sixFor this is how the world beginswithsix five four three two one





	1. Meredith Plum

**Author's Note:**

  * For [clytemnestras](https://archiveofourown.org/users/clytemnestras/gifts), [happyg_rl](https://archiveofourown.org/users/happyg_rl/gifts).



> I used a prompt-machine online and got this:
> 
> A young woman in her late teens, who is very mysterious.  
> A woman in her late forties, who can be quite sensitive.  
> The story begins in a museum.  
> Someone hitches a ride home during a train strike.  
> It's a story about learning from mistakes.  
> Your character has some questions to answer.

 

Meredith Plum had developed a very specific schedule and pattern of behavior that she was perversely proud of.

Somewhere in the part of her mind that remembered the kickboxing classes her military step-mother had forced her to take as a teenager knew that always walking the same path had the potential to be a bit disastrous. 

_ Always take a different route, carry your keys in your hands, look everyone in the eye as they pass, pay attention to your surroundings, never let your guard down _ , these key phrases that had been second nature in her teens and twenties, started to slip the further into her thirties she got, until she rounded the corner of forty and began a different set of priorities. 

Was she leaving herself open to misfortune and potential attack? Maybe. But did that also mean that she walked out of her favorite coffee shop at the same time every day, hot coffee warming her hands against the brisk spring morning air? Did that also mean that she wandered home through the Capitol gardens every evening, wandering along the same paths in the same order, greeting new buds and smiling fondly at wilting petals with an eye that remembered each leaf and branch as if it were an old friend? 

Did that also mean that she harbored the barest little spark of guilt during each bi-monthly conversation with her mothers, both faces peering concernedly at her through the screen in her studio apartment, matching furrowed brows and distracted smiles? 

Sure.

Meredith Plum had developed a very specific schedule that she was perversely proud of, after spending too much time in her post-grad days feeling a bit like she was being battered around, blown a bit by the wind and her own wayward soul that felt as though she was  _ supposed _ to wander but always feeling a bit wounded by the actual experience of being free. Now she knew exactly where and how she was supposed to be at any given time of the day. Her world and patterns operated with such metered, exacting perfection that had anyone took note, her very steps upon the pavement as she went about her day had the same purposed rhythm of the second-hand on a clock tick-tocking it's progress around and around and around. 

On the third Saturday of every month, for example, Meredith went for a brisk walk, showered, fed and pet her cat, and then headed towards the Patricia Hayes Museum of Art. In the spring and summer, a market popped up along her path, allowing her a breakfast of fresh pastries or fruit or sometimes a fresh empanada, tamale, chicken satay, or lumpia in greasy paper bags that she deposited deftly in the bin outside the public library before ducking across the street into the underground train station. In the winter, wrapped from head to toe in soft wool, she swung through a different alley to pick up a hot coffee and fresh éclairs from the patisserie she only visited during the cold months of the year and looked forward to with a certain amount of nostalgia and anticipation when the summer heat threatened to overtake her generally cheery mood and inconsistent appreciation for sunshine. 

Once inside the museum, she allowed her feet to wander to and fro without guidance. Sometimes trailing behind a guided tour she had already experienced for herself a dozen times, smiling to herself at the reactions of children during the ghostly confessions or delighted gasps of recognition and memory from the elderly. Other times, and these were her favorite sorts of moods in retrospect, she sat still before the same piece for hours, memorizing each line and shadow and play of light until it became a blur of color and tears sprang from the corners of her eyes in true wonder and awe. 

The year she turned forty-two she made a New Year's Resolution (a trick she always did on her birthday rather than January first, because there was something unsubstantial about a yearly beginning that took no note of her own place in the circular nature of things) to become one of  _ those people _ , those precious and precocious individuals that came to art museums and gardens with a sketchbook in tow and added to the world by replicating it in lines and even strokes of pencil-black on soft white. She bought herself a sketchpad and signed up for a class with the local Art Society that met every Thursday evening at seven, and spent her museum-Saturdays sat solemnly before her favorite pieces, tongue between her teeth, toe tapping on the ground impatiently. 

On her forty-third birthday she made a Resolution to take up pottery making and a half-dozen half-filled sketch books were put into a small box in her closet and never looked at again. After 365 days of mixed results, Meredith determined that she would never be one of  _ those people _ and she went back to admiring them from afar, a half-smile wrinkling her cheeks slightly with a new inside-knowledge of the struggle that those beautifully artistic and stubborn people battered themselves against in an attempt to show the world what it looked like in their own eyes, only to have their fingers and hands betray them day after day. 

Whether or not that year of study and practice resulted in anything particularly artistic, or if in those discarded pages there was any glimpse into the world that showed itself only to Meredith Plum, no one would ever know. Whether the world according to this solitary, particular woman revealed any secrets or unseen beauties or horrors was left only to her eyes as always. And whether what she created on those pages was put away in a box because it was not what she was trying to portray – either because something new was revealed to her that she did not care to see or because her eyes gave the world a tinted glow that her pencils could never capture correctly – only she would ever know. 

Such is the nature of discarded art and forgotten projects. 

This truth was something that would appeal to Meredith Plum's poesy soul, if she had thought of her own artistic pursuits as being important enough to reveal something so desperate. But the prevailing truth that kept her on a clockwork pace  through life, was that she saw nothing whatsoever of poetry within herself and felt very strongly that anyone who said otherwise was lying or daft. 

On the third Saturday of April of Meredith Plum's forty-sixth year of life, she stepped briskly through the warm spring morning, picking up an iced Thai coffee in a paper bag a few steps from the market and a package of miniature potato pancakes from a stall she'd never seen before in a far corner run by four women of various but indeterminate ages with round rosy cheeks and matching smiles, and pat the winged lions that guarded the lonely, boarded up mansion gates in the shaded alley behind the library, ducked below ground, and stepped onto the 9:58 train without breaking a stride or pausing the slightest bit without great intention, like the world's most elegant ballet with no director and no audience and only the sound of the city slowly breaking the barrier between sleepy beginnings and the full-swing of activity as her musical accompaniment. On the train she plucked a small, local literary publication out of her purse and scribbled distractedly at the crossword puzzle beneath the article detailing a high school's possibly-genius, possibly-misguided musical production of  _ Twelfth Night _ . Two stops later (3 across: foliage,  _ leaves _ ; 12 down: incorrigible,  _ Kurt- 11 and “____” _ ) Meredith folded up her paper smoothly, tucking her pencil in the elegantly thoughtless twist of thick black hair at the base of her neck, and stepped purposefully off the train, her sandals clacking against the white tile of the otherwise empty station. 

On Saturdays, the Patricia Hayes Museum of Art opened at 10 a.m. On the third Saturday of the month, members of the local Hayes Society, a collaboration between the Museum of Art, the Library's Special Collection, the University Archives and Special Projects, and the Hayes Theatre, had free entrance into the museum as well as a complimentary lemonade or coffee at the gift shop and the option to one of the self-guided audio tours kept locked beneath the Reception desk. Meredith stepped through the doors at precisely 10:12 a.m. as she did every third Saturday and handed Walter, the stooped and graying ticket-taker, a small bag of fresh cherries from the market with a wink and a kiss on his wrinkled cheek, and then took a deep breath.

On the third Saturday of every month, Meredith Plum, who lived a life so completely metered and measured that there was a brilliant sort of musical quality to the precision of her movements and habits, let go of her inner metronome and lost herself in color and form and light and shadow. In these hours moving fluidly amongst marble and paint and oil and wood, she lost herself to the girl deep in her heart that grew up at her grandmother's knee listening wide-eyed to stories of tricksters and gods and souls and dark forests with a yearning for adventure and a wildly thumping inner beat that spoke of winding paths with no ends and oceans full of mysteries waiting to be discovered and tamed by her and only her.

Once, she had tried to be this girl always, following the wind and the sun and the moon the way heroes did in her grandmothers stories, only there was something so painful about being daring, so destructive about wandering, so vulnerable looking for adventure, that she tamed the wild part of her out of a desperate desire to protect it.

Once, she had been young and foolish. 

The twisting stairwells and broad rooms greeted her like an old friend, welcoming her with dark, shining wood and worn carpets. The art on the walls and gathered in categories in glass cabinets greeted her with something darker, something brighter, something that hurt and soothed in the same moment. Color and shadow and light and wonder. Meredith Plum wandered these rooms and felt something unknowable sink into her skin with each breath no matter how many times she visited, no matter how many times she lost herself there, her heart beating like a jackrabbit in her chest.

On the third Saturday of April in Meredith Plum's forty-sixth year, she stepped into the Patricia Hayes Museum of Art and took a deep breath, filling her lungs with the musk of history and freshness of time just as she did every month, and let her feet take her to a dimly lit room on the second floor, settling down in an arm chair tucked into a corner but facing a painting of a ship being tossed upon the waves of a storm, surrounded by gray and purple clouds, a flash of lightning streaking through the center of the image; her purse forgotten beside her, elbows on her knees, chin in her hands, eyes wide and lips parted in wonder. 

Cursory visitors, finding nothing of note in this room designed to remind visitors of the original residents of the converted mansion, presumed Meredith's still form to be a strange wax figure, her long skirt and dark eyebrows on a thin face in the gloom of the room evoking a feeling of yearning and memory to any that caught her visage out of the corner of their eye, a disconcerting sense that pushed strangers away rather than pulling them in. Other Society members, who knew Meredith by sight if not by name, peeked into the room only to feel suddenly as though they had forgotten something – much like the sensation of being on the steps of your apartment and being struck with the strange fear that you had forgotten your keys or left the oven on or never sent that important email, only for none of these facts to be proven true upon further investigation.

From 10:27 a.m. to 1:14 p.m., Meredith Plum sat in near-perfect solitary stillness, the distant murmuring of hushed voices and clattering of feet creating a rocking, pleasant hum in her ears that her imagination turned into wind and waves and the creaking sound of a ship upon the water. Blinking herself back into action, Meredith gathered her wits, locked the wild thing back in her heart and out of her veins, chatted with the girl in the gift shop over her complimentary lemonade for a moment or two and then stepped out into the sunshine, her beat returning to it's normal determination, and began her journey home.

At 12:56 p.m. within the Patrica Hayes Museum of Art, something very strange happened that changed the course of Meredith's carefully planned composition in an irreversible way that she was not yet aware of, but that after learning of it so deeply appealed to her musical, poesy soul that she could not resist the pull of it and laughed a deep-belly laugh for the first time in many years.

That happens much later.

At 1:42 p.m., moments before Meredith was about to step down the first stair that led to the underground train, the power blinked out all over the city and a  _ whoosh _ of crackling electricity seemed to pass through the air in protest. By this point, the composition of Meredith's life was so changed that going backwards was as impossible as not going forwards. But just as in all the best stories she heard at her grandmother's knee, the ones she begged to be told over and over her heart flipping at twists she knew as intimately as every wrinkle on her grandmother's perfect, smiling face, she did not know this simple fact and spent far too much time fighting against the tide of her own heart, nearly breaking it in the process.

Heroes, she was about to learn, only earn that title by going into battle without armor around their hearts.


	2. Chesa Stewart

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> She was just an ordinary girl living an ordinary life. In the beginning.

Chesa Bautista-Stewart, aged sixteen, and the fourth-born in a family of six daughters was not the sort of girl that one picked out of a crowd and determined was exceptional, by deed or by expression. 

 

In fact, Chesa had the sort of unfortunate blank expression behind her round eyeglasses that one generally found in a particularly vacant Pomeranian – neither the resting scowl of the youngest of her sisters, Mahalia, or the open, frank charm of the eldest, Tala. For the short period of time between Chesa's second birthday and Apple's second, it seemed as though she would follow the example of Reyna and greet the world with wide-eyed wonder at every turn. And then shortly after her seventh birthday she finally went through a much-anticipated stage of rebellion that every sister before her had entered at two and was either still thick in the throes of or had passed through it with little scarring on either side – and the aunties on both sides of the thick family tree believed she may become a bit more like Precious – the second oldest and one who, at about six months, developed a loving, charming personality hiding behind what their father called  _ a face like a punch in the face _ . This, also, never fully transpired. Though rumor was that there were still a few aunties holding on to bets placed when she was still in diapers. 

 

Chesa Stewart, aged sixteen, and the fourth-born in a family of six daughters, sixth-born in a family of over forty first-cousins, to a mother with five sisters and a father with three sisters and four brothers, was not the sort of girl that one picked out of a crowd – even (or especially) one made up of family. 

 

She had the gap-toothed smile of her father's mother and the broad nose of her mother's grandmother and the same dark, curling hair that grew wildly out of the heads of all of her sisters but that she alone kept as wild as a lion's mane, the sometimes-hazel but mostly-brown eyes that occurred once a generation that her father's family attributed to an Irishman too far back to matter, and the long, brown limbs of a newly-born gazelle. 

 

In truth, she was probably her paternal grandfather's favorite of all his dozens of grandchildren, but this point of fact was much challenged when her older sisters and cousins began producing children of their own – because if there was one thing that could tear the old man's attention from Chesa it was a great-grandchild looking up at him with new eyes seeing only color and shapes and no claims yet on anything resembling perspicacity.

 

There was also a distant great-aunt Lydia on her mother's side, the second-cousin of their grandmother's foster brother, who was particularly enamored with Chesa above all, but this only caused Chesa to get into a series of unfortunate scrapes as will soon be revealed. 

 

“Never trust the old lady that smells like cats and passes out hard candies at a family reunion with lipstick on her teeth, who knows your birthday but is fuzzy on the details of how she specifically fits into the family tree,” Pat had said conspiratorially one afternoon lying on Chesa's bunk the summer they turned 13 while they listened to Precious and Tala attempt to solve a dispute between Mahalia and Reyna in the next room. Things seemed so much less...  _ clear _ after they took that final step from childhood into teenage-hood. Pat compensated by doling out prophetic sayings and ill-fitting advice, as if she had some sort of control over her own life. Chesa began a slow but steady retreat into herself, which caused (unbeknown to her) several concerned late-night chats between her parents and also between Tala and Precious, who doted on their younger siblings with a fierceness Chesa would only learn was unusually beautiful long after she left the safety net of her childhood home. 

 

Pat was the most beautiful person Chesa had ever known and she was fiercely proud of her, in much the way an owner is proud and terrified of their pet python, knowing full well that  _ ownership _ was a relative term that could one day result in one or both of their deaths, though this fact was not the kind one spoke aloud even to their best friend. Pat was also a cousin – because there were just so many of them that it seemed pointless to everyone to attempt friendship anywhere else – though to anyone outside the complicated family tree she was just Pat and Chesa was just her gangly shadow. 

 

Chesa giggled, “What are you talking about?”

 

Pat rolled her dark eyes and sighed and Chesa's fingers itched to reach out and touch her soft eyelashes with her finger like she had done when they were small. “I mean, Auntie Lisbeth can list off with excruciating detail how she is our  _ aunt _ because twenty years ago her step-sister's cousin dated one of your dad's brothers and when they had a kid but mommy dearest ran off, Lisbeth took the baby in and has been part of the family ever since. She also once told me that the Irishman great-grandpop  _ claims _ gave you those beguiling green eyes was part of her family tree way back as well, damn near pulled out an ancient family Bible to prove it, too.”

 

Chesa, one ear still tuned to the argument between her sisters, wrinkled her nose, “Gross.”

 

“I mean, slaver-ancestry implications aside, she fucking  _ knows _ where she fits and where everyone fits. Hell, she damn near knows me better than I know myself.”

 

“What's your point, kid?”

 

Pat glowered, she hated it when Chesa made any sort of allusion to their two-week difference in age. “Oh I'm just rambling… like auntie Lisbeth says – it's just the Orient in me. Thinking up fairy tales where there are none.” 

 

“She did  _ not _ say that,” Apple poked her head into the room as she passed down the hallway in a crowd of other girls all still sweaty and red from lacrosse practice. The surrounding high schools had never cared much for lacrosse until Apple had picked up a stick and corralled a passel of younger cousins into practicing with her during long summer days in family backyards all over the city. Now, the rivalry was mostly contained the Bautista-Stewarts in the beginning, but the general inability for either family tree to hold a grudge at any team containing one of  _ their girls _ seemed to pave the way for a rivalry in name only. Until the schools' administrations caught wind of the fact that suddenly several of their teams were in the running for State Championship – after decades of a nearly defunct program – and by the end of their first season, five schools were suddenly whipped into a frenzy generally only given to football or the boy's baseball teams. With her head hanging upside down over the edge of the bed, Chesa had counted at least three different team colors pass by her door. 

 

Apple frowned up at Pat, “I'm telling pop. That's fucked up.”

 

“He hates it when you call him pop,” Chesa pointed out helpfully in the same moment that Tala called out from the next room over the sound of Mahalia's tears, “Pop's gonna wash your mouth out with soap again if he hears that kind of language,  _ young lady _ .”

 

Her sisters' voices were nearly swallowed up by a chorus of lacrosse chants, which gave Apple the opportunity to ignore both of them and turn back to Pat, “I can definitely bench-press that old bitch. Let me know if she says anything stupid like that again.”

 

“Come on, A. She's just old,” Pat mumbled, her face flushed with embarrassment. 

 

Apple snorted and took off down the hallway, flipping her waist-length braid over her shoulder. 

 

Chesa looked down at Pat, “She's right you know. I mean, not the violence parts…”

 

Pat shrugged and lifted herself up on one elbow to peer down at her, “I'm the tranny son of your grandpop's gay brother's adopted Chinese daughter and her high school sweetheart who ran out on her the second he realized I was conceived. Trust me, I've heard worse than that maybe my mom gave me some kind of psychic-romantic-Oriental abilities.” The last was said with a teasing lilt that Chesa recognized as one of Pat's many practiced armors, her left eyebrow rising in a perfect arch. 

 

_ A Chinese fairy princess _ , Chesa thought for the millionth time in her short life. 

 

“You think auntie Lydia is up to no good?” she changed the subject, knowing that Pat could in this moment sink into her melancholy with a manic perseverance if not distracted. “She's like… two  _ hundred _ years old. I don't think she could hurt a fly.”

 

The jingle of her mother's keys came drifting up through the open window and Chesa sprung off the bunkbed in one bound, it was her day to set the table for dinner and if mom was home, then she had fifteen minutes before dad came rumbling up the drive in the old station wagon, which meant fifteen minutes to assess the damage Reyna's science homework and Apple's lacrosse cousins had done to the dining room table, figure out which -  if any – grandparents or aunties or great-uncles were due for dinner, and get the long table cleaned and set. 

 

Mahalia could do all of this in as little as seven minutes – because she had a sixth sense for what guests were planned, Precious never took longer than five because the younger girls were terrified of her and never made a mess in the dining room on Tuesdays, and as their father's favorite, Reyna rarely had to do it at all, but Chesa was always late, always risking a swat on the back of her thighs from her father's belt as he strolled through the front door and called out to his wife and daughters in his large, booming voice. Pat rolled her eyes and followed Chesa's uneven gallop down the stairs, catching her arm just before she slipped down the last three like always.

 

The discussion of aunt Lydia's strange behavior was forgotten, auntie Lisbeth was brought up in whispered conversations long after Pat had set off towards home with a bag full of leftovers for her mother and grandfathers, and Chesa forgot about it all after being pulled into service helping Tala with her SAT prep – which mostly consisted of Chesa holding up flash cards and secretly daydreaming about a distant future in a tiny but quiet studio apartment far away from the Bautista-Stewarts.


End file.
